The following is the obituary that Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote
in his monastery magazine following the recent death
of Master Yin Shun.
"Completing the Peace"
Master Yin Shun
(1906-2005)
"May I be able to revisit this human world of
suffering
and hardship life after life, and dedicate myself to
extol the voice of perfect enlightenment for
humanity!"
By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
The Chinese expression used to describe the death of
an eminent monk or nun, yuan ji, literally means
"completion of the peace." On June 3rd, at 10:07 am in
Taiwan, the Venerable Master Yin Shun "completed the
peace," bringing to an end a lifetime that spanned
almost a full century. The passing of Master Yin Shun
is especially significant for us here at Bodhi
Monastery, for he was the teacher of our own founder
and guiding elder, Master Jen Chun. He had thus been
in a sense the "spiritual patron" of our monastery and
its affiliate, the Yin Shun Foundation. While we feel
poignantly the loss of this great mentor, we also
celebrate the end of a life nobly lived in the service
of the Dharma and all humankind.
During the course of his long life, Master Yin Shun
came to be recognized as the foremost Chinese
scholar-monk of the modern age, with close to fifty
volumes to his credit. He had also established a
Buddhist seminary, FuYan Institute of Buddhist
Studies, in Hsin Chu, and a lecture hall, HuiJi, in
Taipei. Master Yin Shun was not only a scholar,
however; he was also a visionary and a reformer.
Unlike the academic scholar, his erudition was not
motivated by a mere thirst for factual knowledge about
Buddhism, but by a desire to understand the
fundamental truth of the Dharma -- to understand
Buddhism in its depths and as a whole. This urge for
understanding was in turn driven by a conviction that
the Buddha's teaching provided the key to rescue the
world from suffering, that it offered a "message of
world benevolence." When he first embraced the Dharma,
however, he found the Chinese Buddhism that he
encountered singularly unfit to meet this urgent
challenge. He thus set out to use his understanding of
Buddhist history and philosophy to transform the face
of Chinese Buddhism and bring it into accord with the
modern age. Though in his early years he faced stiff
opposition from a conservative monastic establishment,
especially after he migrated to Taiwan, for the past
three decades he has been hailed as the most seminal
thinker in the Chinese Buddhist world. In the eyes of
many he would rank with the greatest Chinese masters
of all time. A mark of the esteem he won was seen in
the thousands of monastics and lay devotees who
attended his funeral in Hsin Chu on June 11th. Even
the president of Taiwan came to pay him farewell
homage.
It is significant that Master Yin Shun did not come
from a Buddhist family and thus did not receive the
Dharma as part of his family heritage. He had to
discover it at the end of a long and painful spiritual
search that led him through Taoism, Confucianism, and
even Christianity, and brought him to the edge of
despair. Several years after he began to study
Buddhism, both his parents died in close succession,
and this left him free to fulfill his heart's desire
to enter the homeless life of a monk. He received
ordination in 1930, but his joy was soon overcast by
shadows. When he saw how Buddhism was practiced in the
China of his time, he was struck by the discrepancy
between the Buddha Dharma he read about in the sacred
texts and the stark actuality of Chinese Buddhism that
he could observe around him: a religion mired in
superstition, empty ritual, and blind devotion. This
gap became the problem that obsessed him and that he
sought to rectify in his writings.
To understand the degenerative tendencies in Chinese
Buddhism, Master Yin Shun made a thorough study of the
Chinese Tripitaka, going back to the Indian origins of
Buddhism. Indian Buddhism thus became the focus of his
scholarship. Early in his scholarly career he wrote a
detailed history of Indian Buddhism and later produced
several specialized studies of different topics in
Indian Buddhist history. These include an insightful
attempt to reconstruct the process by which the
canonical collections of the early Buddhist schools
were compiled; a volume on the development of the
Abhidharma systems; and a 1300-page work on the origin
and early history of Mahayana Buddhism. His writings
also explored most of the Indian philosophical
schools, with special emphasis on the Madhyamaka,
which he considered the high point in the evolution of
Buddhist thought. In The Way to Buddhahood, available
in English translation (Wisdom Publications), the
Master synthesized all the "vehicles" of Buddhism in
accordance with a comprehensive scheme that unifies
all the different Buddhist teachings into a single
graded path.
Despite his vast achievements in the sphere of
Buddhist scholarship, Master Yin Shun was not
interested in knowledge for its own sake. His
scholarship was driven, not by an urge for abstract
knowledge, but by a determination to bring to light
the potential of Buddhism as a world-redeeming,
world-illuminating force. The transformed and purified
form of Buddhism that Master Yin Shun advocated, which
constituted his special platform, was what he called
"Buddhism for the human realm." Whereas many Chinese
regarded Buddhism as a protection against ghosts and
demons or as a ticket to a heavenly rebirth, he saw
the Buddha's teachings as a guide to the conduct of
life in this world, the human realm in which we dwell.
His approach to Buddhism thus sought to recover the
human-centered side of Early Buddhism as well as of
the early Mahayana. It also harmonized with the rich
humanistic tradition of indigenous Chinese thought.
However, for Master Yin Shun, the practice of Dharma
was to be applied to life in this world not solely for
mundane benefits -- and this is an important
qualification -- but because this world provides the
proper field for developing the qualities needed to
achieve the ultimate, transcendent Buddhist goal:
perfect Buddhahood. The "human vehicle" is not
self-sufficient, but a means to enter the Buddha
vehicle.
As a Mahayana Buddhist, Master Yin Shun gave
precedence to the practice of the bodhisattva path,
but he emphasized the continuity of this path with the
practices advocated in the Early Buddhism of the
Agamas and Nikayas. He thus helped to recover this
ancient stratum of Buddhist thought and practice, long
lost in Chinese Buddhism. He did not give much
credence to such ideas as "rapid attainment of
Buddhahood" or "becoming a Buddha in this very life,"
nor did he encourage the quest for rebirth in the Pure
Land of Amitabha Buddha. He was particularly resistant
to the deification of the buddhas and bodhisattvas and
the "deity practices" of late Indian Mahayana, which
he considered largely responsible for the decline of
Buddhism in India. He stressed instead what he calls
the "normal" bodhisattva path, which revolves around
the generation of the bodhicitta, the cultivation of
great compassion, the practice of the six paramitas,
and the clarification of right view based on the
wisdom of the middle way. His own great wish, which he
often expressed in his writings, was to be reborn in
the human world again and again and to follow the
bodhisattva path as a human being.
Master Yin Shun did not try to build a personality
cult around himself, nor did he allow others to turn
him into an object of adoration. As a man he was
simple, humble, and unassuming; he always stressed the
central importance of the Dharma, not of himself.
During his life he was a true example of the Buddhist
teaching of selflessness, which he himself explained
with depth and clarity in his writings. Though his
passing deprives us of his physical presence, he will
live on in his teachings, above all in his books. It
remains a major project for Buddhist scholarship in
the West to see that these are translated into
English.